The future of shopping is custom everything:
Chris Clark is not a trend-obsessed tween or the kind of guy who lives for designer sneakers. The 37-year-old Dallas attorney is the rare person who actually just wears his running shoes for running.Yet over the past few years Clark has bought three pairs of kicks from Nike’s NikeID program, carefully customizing everything from the laces to the soles to a label with his middle name — Inslee — emblazoned on it.
“Nike is what I’ve always worn,” Clark explains. “But sometimes you find a shoe that fits great and the colors in the stores are awful. I still care about how they look.”
Nike isn’t the only brand offering custom shoes:
In the sneaker world, there may be no greater brand contrast to Nike, with its high-tech designs and superstar spokespeople, than Keds. While the top-of-the-line shoes that Nike sells are generally priced above $100, Keds’ canvas sneakers retail for around $35.Except, that is, for the custom versions, which became available through Keds Studio in August. The shoes, on which shoppers can print any color, pattern, or image, run $60. And in the first three months of business, Keds had 80,000 customizations, though not all translated into purchases, however, especially given the economic slowdown.
Keds had wanted to play in the custom space for years, says Charlene Higgins-Crawford, the company’s e-commerce director of merchandising and operations. “It’s taken us a while to figure out how to do it and to find a partner that had the technology.”
Keds Studio was in part made possible by the availability of very high quality digital printers at a price that made the results affordable. Software developments let them give customers a good — and necessary — look at what they were buying. Partnering with Zazzle, a custom printing company that handles the whole process, means the completed shoes can be shipped within just two weeks.